Night. I'm standing just outside my family's old home. We sold it five years ago when my mom died. Strange--now it looks empty.

Silver gap in the clouds. Black sky, stars... and two moons! One full, one nearly. I must be dreaming. I still feel doubtful--even after a lifetime of utterly realistic dreams, I stupidly expect dreams to look & feel DREAMY--but reason tells me two moons side by side (no matter how prosaic that feels) mean I'm dreaming.

Long as I'm lucid, look around. Just inside an open door, I notice... an adjustment knob for the dream! Curious, I crank it up to see what it'll reveal. It controls color saturation! It was set very low for this night scene. As the knob turns, the sky blushes deep blue, the lawn deep green...

...and indoors, people appear! People defined by flat colorfields without shading or lines. Since these camouflaged figures' light-dark values perfectly match their surroundings, they really could hide as long as all color was muted. I twiddle the dial--yep, the people fade in and out. Lurid reveals what sobriety didn't. Huh. A lesson in that!

Strange people. They're a whole family animated quite elegantly in a thirties cartoon style. Living cartoons! Living some invisible parallel life in our old home.

So my family's gone, their home taken over by spirits...

Or did they live here with us all along?

Now I see the house, and us, as a drawing tinted with watercolor. It's my painting style, yet I don't recall doing it.

I lift the watercolor--under it is a charcoal/acrylic sketch on a crescent-scrap of thin, unprimed plywood, of a wolf-woman, with a sense of tension and heft I like. Again, my own work, yet I don't remember it.

Under that, a third sketch: a man curled up fetally--no, a boy, I think it's Oskar, the boy in THE TIN DRUM who refuses to grow up, in protest against Europe's fascism, genocide, war. Me again?

Watercolor of near-invisible family

Wolf-girl on wood

Oskar in his Tin Drum

Under that? A whole stack of art, in diverse media, and not in my style; someone else's work. Very good work. A forgotten thirties cartoonist with fine-art aspirations--and fine-art talent.

I can see why a dream might remind me of art I did and forgot, but why show me all this other art? Someone to learn from?

NOTES IN THE MORNING

Two moons: Wake at 5 AM from the dream to find... they're sorta real. Luna and Venus shine side by side; binoculars reveal two brilliant, identically lit crescents, Venus looking about one-thirtieth as big.

Go lucid, saturation dial reveals hidden people: could this mean dream interpretation itself? I only get the message when I treat a dream as a message and LOOK for it--look closely, turn up the scrutiny dial. Or color may mean emotion--don't just look for symbols, but feelings.

Heh. I could try that on waking-world scenes too. Are they just as much lessons as dreams? Radical concept! But Buddha thought so. "All the world's a dream, and all the people but players in it..."

Three artpieces I recognize as mine: three life-issues the dream wants me to look at:

Watercolor of family home full of spirits: Second sight runs in my family. My sisters & I all grew up with a sixth sense we denied & hid (since Dad called it "superstitious"--though he had it too!)

Wolf girl: She was cuuute. So, furry orientation? But she may mean autism, too! Because of it I barely think of myself as human; I relate to, identify with, and am attracted to just as many nonhuman creatures as human ones.

Oskar from "The Tin Drum": Like him I was a pacifist; I refused to fight. They broke my ribs but not my will. I refused to grow up and be what they called a man.

This other impressive dreamlike artist: I've been reading comics by Eric Shanower. Age of Bronze, and a comics tribute to Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland where he tossed in a six-page mini-tribute to Gustave Verbeck's Little Lady Lovekins and Old Man Muffaroo--a palindromic cartoon you read to the end, turned upside down, and reread for the quite different second half--the images meant other things upside down. Shanower's formidable--does McCay & Verbeck better than they did!

So... what DOES all that art mean? Maybe just... "Learn from Shanower's process. He mastered the styles of those he admired--and pushed them further! Even past masters aren't perfect."

And... face that race, culture, gender identification & preference, age, religion, money, education, class... just don't define us well. Even such extreme differences as autism don't explain much. Are many autistics furverts? Do many gifted kids see auras, ghosts, spirits? How many of you gender rebels grew up trying to be Gandhi? The issues the dream highlights are things neurotypicals dismiss as unreal. I think the dream points out a whole stack of things modern society doesn't even see.

Unless we turn the story upside down, like Verbeck. Or, of course, crank the saturation dial.